The Explorers Club

The Explorers Club is an international multidisciplinary professional society dedicated to the advancement of field research and the ideal that it is vital to preserve the instinct to explore. The headquarters is located at 46 East 70th Street in New York City in a historic building purchased with a donation by the world famous journalist, Lowell Thomas. Since its inception in 1904, the Club has served as a meeting point and unifying force for explorers and scientists worldwide.

Promoting Exploration for Over One Hundred Years
The Explorers Club promotes the scientific exploration of land, sea, air, and space by supporting research and education in the physical, natural and biological sciences. Club members have been responsible for an illustrious series of famous firsts: first to the North Pole, first to the South Pole, first to the summit of Mount Everest, first to the deepest point in the ocean, first to the surface of the moon.

The Club provides expedition resources including funding, online information, and member-to-member consultation. The highly renowned annual dinners honor accomplishments in exploration. But probably the most powerful resource available to members is fellowship with other members-a global network of expertise, experience, technology, industry, and support. The Explorers Club actively encourages public interest in exploration and the sciences through its public lectures program, publications, travel programs, and other events. The Club also maintains research collections at headquarters which include an extensive library of exploration and a unique map room which preserve the Club history and assist those interested and engaged in exploration and scientific research.

Carrying the Flag
The Explorers Club flag represents an impressive history of courage and accomplishment and has been carried on hundreds of expeditions by Club members since 1918. Flags are awarded to expeditions after review of the scientific merit and have flown at both poles, from the highest peaks of the greatest mountain ranges, travelled to the depths of the ocean, to the lunar surface, and outer space. A flag expedition must further the cause of exploration and field science. Today there are 202 numbered flags, each with its own history.

Anthropologists to Zoologists
Explorers Club HeadquartersThe Explorers Club, which has some thirty chapters in the United States and around the world, has great diversity in the backgrounds and interests of its members. The seven founding members included two polar explorers, the curator of birds and mammals at The American Museum of Natural History, an archaeologist, a war correspondent and author, a professor of physics and an ethnologist. Today the membership includes field scientists and explorers from over sixty countries whose disciplines include: aeronautics, anthropology, archaeology, astronomy, biology, ecology, entomology, expedition medicine, mountaineering, marine biology, oceanography, paleontology, physics, planetology, polar exploration, and zoology.